(un)Irony

Sometimes I really wonder what God is thinking. There are many times (as of late) that I am continually amazed at where God has me. I live in a house with a crazy amount of young women. Young women who are in great need of love & nurturing. Some days I have no idea what God was really thinking when He opened the door for this job.  Many days I find myself asking Him if He realizes the type of woman that is needed to provide such love & nurturing? I know He knows, and I know that because I am made in His image I am capable of providing such love & nurturing...However, the application of feeling & agreeing with such truths is not always the case...

And yet there are days in which I get to be the source of mothering and nurturing, and I'm amazed by what God is doing. I'm quite sure that more often than not I still get in my own way and continue to agree with the lies that I'm so much a thinker that I can't be as loving & nurturing as others. Lies, Lies, and more Lies. Today was a day in which I not only royally bombed at being a nurturer with the girls, but also a day of great redemption. Thank God, He's in the business of redemption!!! It's in the moments that God amazes me with my ability to provide any sense or source of nurturing that I am reminded of how it's only because of grief that I can sit side-by-side with these young women, hold on to them and love on them.

By nature I tend to be a rule follower, but when it comes to nurturing, I feel like I don't always know what the rules are. That is where grief comes in; I needed to grieve the loss of not having a model of nurturing. By grieving a lack of nurturing influence I have been able to walk more and more into the nurturing woman that God created me to be...Better yet, I opened myself up to receive an amazing gift - the amaZing gift of a new mothering nurturer in my life! A mother who is teaching me more and more how to love everyday.

At times all of this can be oh so overwhelming. Overwhelming because I'm still learning how to have someone nurture me, and because I never know what the girls are going to need. Some days they need lots & lots of nurturing, and more often than not it's on days where I'm very much in my head and feel the more incapable of being a nurturer...which causes me to sit and usually cry out in frustration "God what were you thinking?!?!?" Some days this cry of frustration builds into agreements with lies, but on other days it becomes a beautiful picture of God's redemption in my life and the lives of the young women God has placed in my life & in my heart.

How ironic that God has placed me (someone very much in process of learning how to be a nurturer) in a house full of young women who need to be nurtured so desperately. And yet at the end of the day, how very not ironic, and oh how very perfect.